Web marketing essentials – What you can do to be seen on the net
With so many websites currently on the web today it is important that you pay attention to the marketing of your website in order to be found. What are the essential tasks you will need to do to ensure that your website gets seen?
Optimise your content for search engines
Everything starts with your content. Make sure that you know which keywords you are targeting in the search engines before you write your content. Start your pages with your main keywords featuring in the first few sentences. Make sure you have good descriptive page titles and headings and add your metatags. The more quality content you have for the search engines to chew on the more likely you will be found. It is also a good idea to submit a sitemap to Google through Google’s webmaster tools.
Don’t forget to optimise your images as well
A lot of people now search for images. So make sure that you give clear descriptive titles to your images and add short and long description tags.
Don’t duplicate large sections of content on your site
Google and other search engines do not like duplicate content so make sure that an article is only displayed once. If you have a site with many articles, archives etc make sure that your front page and archives only display excerpts of the posts.
Improve your pagerank
In order to improve your page rank try to get links to your website from other reputable sites. Also avoid having too many unnecessary outbound links on your own site. Another thing you can do with some of the links on your site is to add no follow tags which basically tell the search engines not to follow and rank that link.
Email newsletter
If you already have contacts or a customer base send them an email about your website and any new features on it. Keep using your email newsletters on a regular basis to remind your contacts about you.
RSS feeds
On many websites you can subscribe to an RSS feed. With rss feeds your readers / customers can receive articles from your website when they become available. They can then read this in their email programs or readers whenever they feel like it and without having to give you their email address. So having a section on your website that is regularly updated with new articles that can be subsribed to through RSS is a good way to remind your customers about you. You could even do podcast feeds!
Use social networks
Encourage visitors to hook up with you on social networks like Twitter, Linked in and facebook. It is another way of reminding people about you and your business website. Twitter can be very useful to engage your visitors on a frequent basis. If you are new to Twitter then stay tuned for an upcoming article.
Send out press releases
Grab every news opportunity to send press releases to blogs, magazines, local newspapers, and other media to draw attention to your site. Many websites and magazines are constantly on the look-out for news so they may be more than happy to publish your article.
Even if you did everything right, it still takes time
You will need to realise though that achieving good results will take time and effort. Good rankings are not something you can achieve by just getting your descriptions and metatags right first time. It is a constant process of adjusting, monitoring and promoting. Google will also take time to rank your site and new sites will sometimes have to wait a few months before they see any good results.
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